Scanned light beam imaging is employed for various purposes including electrophotographic printing. In such systems used for printing, a light beam generated, for example, by a laser is selectively modulated to vary its amplitude while it is scanned laterally across a moving photoconductor to selectively discharge the photoconductor. Such systems have been binary in nature (xe2x80x9conxe2x80x9d or xe2x80x9coffxe2x80x9d) to accomplish printing of character information by selectively either exposing the photoconductor or leaving it unexposed. To insure complete exposure, adjacent scan lines are usually overlapped slightly. Thus, any slight misalignment of the scans or change in beam size would not be noticed.
This cannot be done if the light beam modulation is other than binary because in any partial exposure, a substantial overlap would appear as a stripe of complete exposure. Alternatively, spacing the scans apart would appear as a stripe that remains unexposed. To attempt to prevent such stripes by substantially eliminating the optical and mechanical tolerances from the system would appear to be prohibitively expensive.
It is therefore an object of the present invention to eliminate the perception of elongated stripes in such optical imaging systems without requiring substantial tightening of allowable optical or electromechanical tolerances.
A method for banding suppression due to vibration in an imager utilizing a light emitting diode (LED) array is disclosed. By characterizing the LED array and knowing the amplitude and frequency of the signal due to vibration which causes the banding, the LEDs"" deriving currents are modulated in reverse direction corresponding to the banding signal to suppress the banding.